Monthly Archives: August 2009

It’s been a while. I’ve been wanting to “close” my online journal but time, work, and all those things conspired against me. I’ll do it soon, with some overviews, but just for now, here’s an “inspiration” from the states. One of my favorites: Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself: an edited extract from his epic, “Leaves of Grass”. I editied the poem and put the video together, my good friend Dave Muldoon read it (beautifully), and the music is, of course, Once Upon a Time in the West by Ennio Morricone. The words are below (and also in Italian for the benefit of my host-nation nationals).

Song of Myself
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples in buzz’d whispers; love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing
of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,

The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising
from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the
earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in
books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
There will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

I am satisfied – I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As God comes, a loving bed-fellow, and sleeps at my side all
night, and withdraws on the peep of the day

And leaves for me baskets cover’d with white towels bulging the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my
eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the contents of one and exactly the contents of two, and which is ahead?

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm to an impalpable certain rest,
Looks with its side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with
linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

I believe in my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to
you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not
even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.